'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Muntaha Amin: What Studying At Ramjas College Did To My Unquestioning Faith In Religion

Born into a very
religious family, religion and religious teachings were taught to me as a way
of life. The teaching was spoon-fed to me right from childhood. The notion that
you can’t question God’s words, rulings, and commandments no matter what, and I
believed in all of this and was a practising Muslim. With these teachings being
my worldview, I was indeed an automaton to faith. But faith had somehow been
more of fear of God’s punishment to me than love for God. And I guess that was
the first undoing. I had internalised and normalised all kinds of things and
never thought of anything as unjust and repressive. Education in school and
higher secondary was yet another training for being automatons and machines in
the system, of being – a utility, never questioning, never trying to look at
the world from any other perspective, never questioning the ways of seeing. The
end product was, very exclusively exam oriented approach, well, almost mugging
up and scoring good in the exams which would bring in a good job and add to
one’s privileges.

After coming to Delhi
and getting enrolled in Ramjas College, the real journey of immense
breakthroughs started in my life. My course was an honors in English Literature
and my professors introduced me to critical thinking, critical inquiry into
social sciences, and I got introduced to different worldviews. In the initial
days in my classes, I learnt about ideas I had never thought of or imagined
before. The first lecture with Debraj Mookherjee was also one that would stay
with me forever. He said we needed to question everything, starting from what
we were taught in schools. Lectures with Vinita Chandra started with disbelief
from my side, getting scandalised after hearing different notions about gender
and sexuality and thinking of them as too radical. Vinita ma’am answered all my
questions with utmost patience and never lost her calm to the most regressive
defences I showed. I was a homophobe, yes.

Gender in religion
slowly started making me very uncomfortable. Questions of choice, will, agency,
assertion, wanting representation in all fields of life, visibility in public
and political spaces, right to religion or no religion, right to privacy – all
these ideas started burgeoning in my personal space.

Conflicting worldviews
existing side by side got my mind messier than ever. Questions started piling
up, nobody happened to satisfy me with their answers. On the other hand, there
were answers in logic, rationality and looking at things from a material point
of view rather than ideological. The pull of rationality was strong indeed, but
my faith was no less stronger then. A year of questions, insomnia, rapidly
losing weight, mind being impossibly active and thinking all the time, mental
fatigue and anxiety followed.

Looking at religion
critically, I realised that religion would make “us” and “them” of humans in
the definition itself, that is where my problems with it started. The first
writing tutorial with Vinita Chandra was to analyse John Lennon’s “Imagine”
(the lyrics). I’d never heard or read that before. Imagine there’s no religion,
nothing to kill or die for. Imagine all the people, living for today. I started
imagining, and it wasn’t as difficult as it seemed. But the process and my
journey weren’t all too easy. It was the hardest time for my mental health… read more: